Letters

"She said there ain't no rest for the wicked..."- Ain't No Rest for the Wicked, Cage the Elephant

I've begun reading a book titled The Letters of Tolkien which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. I discovered the book in a library while manipulating my college educators into letting me write a term paper on magic in The Hobbit, when I used several of Tolkien's letters as sources for my analysis. Excited by the find, I talked about it to my parents and they bought me a copy for Christmas that year. Then came London and a whole lot of life and the book went unread, until now.

What I find most interesting about the letters so far is that Tolkien's skill as a writer and, especially, a storyteller, shines through so well in them. I haven't yet reached far into his life, and most of the letters themselves are excerpts from his time at Oxford or serving during World War One. The information in them is often esoteric, not directly linked to Middle-Earth at all, and generally not what I picked up the book to read.

And yet I read on anyway, swept up by Tolkien's prose, even when it's misspelled or the editors couldn't decipher his handwriting, and his ability to create scenes and tell stories.

Since graduating college, I've exchanged a number of e-mails with friends and professors of mine whom I'm not likely to see for a long time, and whom I would absolutely have lost touch with without this concerted effort to stay a part of each other's lives. And I have discovered that though I sometimes procrastinate writing my lengthy replies to them, their messages are often the highlight of my day when they come.

I think this is something that my generation misses. It is so easy for us to pick up a cell phone and call someone or to hold conversations instantly with a dozen people at once over the internet, that we miss the anticipation of waiting for a letter to come, lose a sense of the concentration and sheer amount of time it takes to craft a missive for someone else. I have gained a sense of this with the e-mail dialogues I hold now, but I also remember writing love letters to girlfriends as a kid sequestered away in the Adirondacks for summers at a time, beyond the reach of telephones or the internet.

There is a certain amount of respect and humility that comes in taking the time to hand-write a personal letter. It says, "I am willing to dedicate this amount of precious time to you, during which I will not do anything else." I'm not sure if that is always respected by my generation as much as it should be. I know that I, at least, have been guilty of underestimating it in the past. Perhaps if I had taken the time to write letters during one long-distance relationship I had that wound up failing spectacularly, rather than relying on cell phones and instant messages, things would have turned out differently.

So in the future I shall write more letters, and furthermore I am resolved, once I am famous enough that people want to write me (ha!), to take the time to answer every hand-written letter that arrives to me in kind, even if it is not convenient, and to always be available for a rational discussion of just about anything with an interested party via mail. I would encourage others, writers or no, to do the same.